"Welcome to Holland" by Emily Perl Kingsley, 1987
When you’re going to have a baby, it’s like planning a
fabulous vacation trip to Italy. You buy a bunch of guide books and make your
wonderful plans. The Coliseum, the Sistine Chapel, Gondolas. You may learn some
handy phrases in Italian. It’s all very exciting. After several months of eager
anticipation, the day finally arrives. You pack your bags and off you go.
Several hours later, the plane lands. The stewardess comes
in and says, “Welcome to Holland!”
“Holland?” you say. “What do you mean, Holland? I signed up
for Italy. I’m supposed to be in Italy. All my life I’ve dreamed of going to
Italy.”
But there’s been a change in the flight plan. They’ve landed
in Holland and there you must stay.
The important thing is that they haven’t taken you to a
horrible, disgusting, filthy place full of pestilence, famine, and disease.
It’s just a different place.
So, you must go out and buy new guidebooks. And you must
learn a whole new language. And you will meet a whole new group of people you
would never have met. It’s just a different place. It’s slower paced than
Italy, less flashy than Italy.
But after you’ve been there for a while and you catch your
breath, you look around. You begin to notice that Holland has windmills.
Holland has tulips. And Holland even has Rembrandts.
But everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy,
and they’re all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there. And for
the rest of your life you will say, “Yes, that’s where I was supposed to go.
That’s what I had planned.” And the pain of that experience will never, ever,
ever, go away. The loss of that dream is a very significant loss. But if you
spend your life mourning the fact that you didn’t get to Italy, you may never
be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things about Holland.
I have been blog neglectful. I need to get back on the bandwagon. So much to talk about. So little time. Soon. But we are enjoying Holland!
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